My daughter, who started K at 4.5 and college at 17, asked her husband the other day if he thought they would have dated if she’d started college a year later. He said no, because he would have been a senior and she a freshman. It didn’t bother him that she was 18 when they started dating and he 21, but he didn’t think he would have dated a freshman when he was a senior. There were things she couldn’t attend with him, like a concert sponsored by a whiskey company that required everyone to be 21, but usually their age difference wasn’t a problem.
Sometimes things are just fate.
2 Likes
My wife and I had 2 kids. The oldest, a boy, has an August 31 birthday and was the youngest in his class. He is smart but could have benefitted from starting school a year later as he did lack a bit of maturity compared to his classmates. He also had a vision tracking issue that wasn’t diagnosed until the 5th grade. The vision issue made him have issues with reading mechanics as he got along in school. It muddied the waters as to the decision as to when to start him in school. When it was diagnosed and treated with vision training, he really started to blossom and was put into the gifted track. Later in high school, the biggest impact was in varsity sports. He was a little less physically mature than his classmates. He could have benefitted from holding him back a year. All in all, though, he did fine. He graduated from engineering school and is now in his late 30’s, working as a test engineer.
My daughter is 4 years younger than my son. After seeing the struggles my son was having, we thought about holding her back a year as her birthday is in mid- October. The school district we were in allowed her to start when she was just 4 years old. Her preschool teachers said she was quite ready and would just be bored with another year in preschool. Most parents did hold kids of her age back a year. The teachers were correct, and you would never have known that she was that much younger than her classmates. She was put onto the gifted track as a second grader. Holding her back would have been a big mistake. She also graduated from engineering school and is doing very well.
The point of all this is that it really depends on the child. But you do have to evaluate more than just how academically prepared the child is. You need to look at all the factors including their physical and emotional maturity.
2 Likes